Monday, October 8, 2018

Dr. Alexander Mishkin, admirer of old English cathedrals; spychips

Dr. Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin, admirer of old English cathedrals

A scanned copy of Alexander Mishkin’s passport, issued in 2001 in St. Petersburg.

Alexander Mishkin was born on 13.07.1979 in the village of Loyga, in the Archangelsk District in Northern European Russia. He studied and graduated from one of Russia’s elite Military Medical Academies and was trained as a military doctor for the Russian naval armed forces. During his medical studies Mishkin was recruited by the GRU and by 2010 had relocated to Moscow, where he received his undercover identity -- including a second national ID and travel passport--under the alias Alexander Petrov.

In the period 2011-2018 Alexander Mishkin traveled extensively under his new identity. Bellingcat has identified multiple trips to Ukraine and to the self-declared Transnistrian Republic, the last of which as late as during the Maidan events in Kyiv in December 2013....Until early September 2014 Mishkin’s registered home address in Moscow was Khoroshevskoe Shosse 76B--the address of the headquarters of the GRU. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/10/08/second-skripal-poisoning-suspect-identified-as-dr-alexander-mishkin/

197. Let savagery reveal itself, for it cannot long remain under a garment of deception. Likewise let the youthful heart exult--it can manifest itself in joyful ascent. Thus let the scale of the Teaching be also an indicator of the dividing line of humanity. Evil and good must be distinguished, but such discrimination is not easily made. -Morya: Brotherhood 1937

5-15-2014 As of mid-2012, the agency was processing more than twenty billion communications events (both Internet and telephone) from around the world each day," Greenwald writes. Greenwald reveals that a program called X-KEYSCORE allows "real-time" monitoring of a person's online activities, enabling the NSA to observe emails and browsing activities as they happen, down to the keystroke. The searches enabled by the program are so specific that any NSA analyst is able not only to find out which websites a person has visited, but also to assemble a comprehensive list of all visits to a particular website from specific computers. …Routers, switches, and servers made by Cisco are booby-trapped with surveillance equipment that intercepts traffic handled by those devices and copies it to the NSA's network, the book states. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/internet-privacy/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html

8-1-2012 hardware backdoor--it’s a lot like a software virus that grants backdoor access to your computer--but the code resides in the firmware of a computer chip. In short, firmware is software that is stored in non-volatile memory on a computer chip, and is used to initialize a piece of hardware’s functionality. In a PC, the BIOS is the most common example of firmware--but in the case of wireless routers, a whole Linux operating system is stored in firmware.

Hardware backdoors are lethal for three reasons: a) They can’t be removed by conventional means (antivirus, formatting); b) They can circumvent other types of security (passwords, encrypted filesystems); and c) They can be injected at manufacturing time….

Assembly master and long-time security consultant Jonathan Brossardsays Rakshasa works on 230 Intel-based motherboards. It is also possible to load Rakshasa into the firmware of another piece of hardware — a network card, for example — and then have Rakshasa automatically transfer itself to the BIOS. Furthermore, the bootkit can be used to create a fake password prompt for Truecrypt and BitLocker, potentially rendering full-disk encryption useless. Finally, the Rakshasa bootkit even allows the remote flashing of the original BIOS — perfectly covering your tracks.

12-13-2013 In some cases, the NSA has modified the firmware of computers and network hardware—including systems shipped by Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, and Juniper Networks—to give its operators both eyes and ears inside the offices the agency has targeted. In others, the NSA has crafted custom BIOS exploits that can survive even the reinstallation of operating systems. And in still others, the NSA has built and deployed its own USB cables at target locations—complete with spy hardware and radio transceiver packed inside.